A rare collection of photographs to be auctioned tomorrow reflects the poverty
and degradation of London in 1877

Just look at these pictures, all taken in the years 1877 or 1878. Some of them are familiar, and they are reproduced in all the illustrated books about the Victorians – the famous recruiting sergeant and his men, for example, outside a Westminster pub. He could be Hardy’s Sergeant Troy. Or “Cast Iron Billy”, with his foot up on the step of an omnibus. He was William Parragreen, who for 40 years drove a horse-drawn omnibus through the streets of London.

They were immortalised by the Scottish photographer John Thomson. Like many of his fellow countrymen, he was a great traveller, and he took some of the very first pictures of the Far East, bringing back to the people of Britain an exotic vision of lands they had only read about in newspapers or travelogues.

When he turned his attentive lens upon the capital of the Empire, however, Thomson revealed the British to themselves. He depicted what his namesake, the alcoholic poet James Thomson, called the “City of Dreadful Night”.

Thomson’s images were sold in monthly parts, three per month, a pictorial equivalent of the serial novels available at railway bookstalls in Victorian times. The parallel is an apt one, for the first thought that must have occurred to many a middle-class purchaser of Thomson’s work was –Charles Dickensdid not lie!

Although the great novelist had been dead for eight years by the time Thomson published his photojournalism, the figures who emerge in Thomson’s sepia images again and again excite the sense that they are “Dickensian”. A little Italian boy plays a harp to collect pennies, watched by a bearded man in a stove-pipe hat, smoking his clay pipe. “Caney”, a clown who had to retire from the circus ring after a varicose vein in his leg burst, sits caning chairs for a living with an umbrella tucked under his arm.

Like Dickens, Thomson was brilliant at capturing the lives of the downwardly mobile. Few people take to the streets of a great city believing them to be paved with gold, or pursuing a “dream”, American or otherwise. They come to cities grubbing about for a basic livelihood, and they often end in the gutter.

A purveyor of quack medicines photographed by Thomson was once a driver – perhaps not the most exalted station in society, but a position nonetheless. Fading eyesight made him abandon his calling, and now he tries to interest two sceptical women in Arabian Family Ointment to cure chapped hands, or cough lozenges at a ha’penny or a penny a packet.

And how Dickens would have relished the “cook-shop” once frequented by the notorious 18th-century criminal Jack Sheppard. In the do-gooding world of Mrs Jellaby and Mr Bumble, the shop has become a refuge for released prisoners, offering leg of beef soup for tuppence a bowl, and run by Mr Bayliss, a former police officer. His client could be a friend of Rogue Riderhood in Our Mutual Friend, a striking figure in a smoking cap, with his head bound up in scarves. Though this man’s head – and ungloved hands – appear to have been fried, he has traces of the respectable about him – his trousers are neatly pressed.

When these photographs were being taken on the streets of London, Disraeli was at the height of his political fame. At the Congress of Berlin in 1878, it was he who masterminded the peace treaty between Turkey and Russia, causing Bismarck to make his famous adulatory comment – “Der Alte Jude, das ist der Mann!” Ireland was in chaos; South Africa was in the state of unrest that would eventually flare, 20 years later, into the Boer War; Afghanistan was on the brink of new troubles.

A refuge for ex-prisoners offers leg of beef soup for 2d a bowl

While the ladies in Thomson’s photographs sell nosegays and used clothes for a few pence, the great landowners were prodigiously wealthy – Disraeli reckoned that the Duke of Bedford coined £300,000 per annum. (The Queen made even more, from the Duchy of Lancaster).

There were no “opportunities”, as such, for the working-class women Thomson snapped, but the world was changing. Even as his shutter clicked, Lady Margaret Hall was founded in Oxford – for the education of young ladies. (Newnham, Cambridge had been founded in 1871.) In 1877, the committee of the Wimbledon All England Croquet and Lawn Tennis Club finalised the rules of tennis, and in the following year, the Australians made their first visit to English pitches for a Test match.

Thomson reminds us how much, how very much, the Victorian poor lived on the streets, worked on the streets, ate and bought on the streets. The “dramatic shoe black” doubled as someone who would shine your shoes and provide street theatre. And indeed, you feel that, like so many of the street vendors in Dickens (think of Silas Wegg in Our Mutual Friend, with his ballad sheets), sale and entertainment went hand in hand, whether you were buying shellfish or halfpenny ices.

Today’s Londoners stay indoors. On the whole, it is only tourists who are compelled to eat takeway food from hot-dog stalls; and anyone in Oxford Street trying to sell you something purporting to be a Rolex from a suitcase would swiftly find themselves being moved on. True, we have beggars in darkened doorways, and Albanian women selling the Big Issue, but it is all pretty tame, compared to the world depicted by Thomson.

What he captures so well is the absolute desolation of the poor and indigent. Thomson’s picture of a “crawler” (a Victorian word for beggar) gets into your soul – as no doubt it was meant to. I wonder how old she is, the hunched little figure of a tailor’s widow in her shawl, as she sits on a doorstep. After her husband died, she tried to live with her daughter and son-in-law, but after innumerable quarrels, they threw her out. Out on to the streets.

She could be any age, for time is not what has carved tragedy on her features – it is sheer ill fortune and desolation. Hers is one of the most wretched faces you ever saw – the dejection is absolute, like the Book of Job. What makes the image so shocking is that this crawler is being used as a child-minder and she has a baby on her lap. For a few pennies a day, some mother was prepared to place her baby into this wretched woman’s arms. You can’t look at this picture and regret the setting up of a welfare state, whatever mistakes Britain might have made along the way since 1945.

Covent Garden flower women

Very few artists, even Hogarth, even Goya, can capture what documentary photography reveals of human poverty and degradation. Thomson’s poor are the poor for whom the Independent Labour Party was founded, the poor who made William Morris a socialist, and who steered John Ruskin, that stern Tory of the old school, to the view that state funding for education and public health were a necessity.

Before the age of photography, there was only the Past, the mysterious Past. A photographic genius such as Thomson makes you see the Victorians as figures very close to us. The expressions on these faces – the mischievous smirk of a little boy, hands in pockets, behind a chimney sweep – could never have been invented by a painter, however ingenious.

Did the Victorian economic success story depend upon ignoring the plight of these people? Was Victorian London the equivalent of 21st-century Mumbai? These are dark thoughts, which will be present to anyone who looks at these pictures. A volume of Thomson’s photographs, Street Life in London, has come up for auction, and it will be sold by Gloucestershire auction house Dominic Winter tomorrow. Whether the purchaser is an institution or an individual, I hope these images will continue to be studied and appreciated. They are so very painful, and so very true.